A Second Essay on The Death of the Author: The Life of the Text

Can a text, or an author’s creation, be original? Or, are all texts re-configurations of non-original content? Can a character, that is created for the purposes of a text, exist on its own, or is it merely a copy of another character — either fictional or factual?

Through Roland Barthes’ essay, The Death of the Author, Barthes tries to establish a removal of the identity of the author from the potential meaning of the text. One can imagine why Barthes wants to continue to attempt to kill the subjectivity of the author in…